First Day of Testing

So today we finally got into the testing of the incinerator. It took quite a bit of patience, but finally at the end of the day we came up with some test results. This morning I came in to the office and realized we had forgotten to charge the analyzer, so we had to wait 3 hours for that to finish, and since the incinerator we were testing hadn't been used in several months, it took a very long time to heat up to required incineration temperatures (700+ degrees C), but after some waiting we finally broke out the new gas analyzer for the first time and ran some tests. After putting so much effort into acquiring an appropriate analyzer, I was pretty nervous that we would get to the testing and something wouldn't work, but to my great relief, everything functioned normally and we got good results. This was just some preliminary testing, and only one category of waste was analyzed, so we haven't really scratched the surface as far as testing goes, but it was still good to see that everything was working normally, and we have a pretty good idea about how we need to go about running the rest of our tests. Nicholas (a different Nicholas than the one mentioned in the last couple of posts) taught me a lot about how the incinerator works, and instructed me on how to run it properly. It really is amazing how well it seems to do it's job for something that seems so plain and simple. Hopefully we'll keep having success as we continue the testing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

- Stokes